lunes, 13 de junio de 2016

The hand as the generating root of human knowledge

In what follows we will attempt to apply
the new operatiological philosophical procedures to which we referred in a
previous article ("For a refundation of the positivist
Philosophy" (21-11-2012) published in this Blog), in order to come
closer to a strictly philosophical comprehension of human knowledge. Already
Kant considered the problem of finding a bridge that would allow him to
overcome the dualism of Aristotelean origin between sensible natural
(phenomenal) and the intelligible moral (noumenal) knowledge. He even wrote in
the Critique of Judgement about an unknown common root that would permit to
connect both the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds. But the task to find such
a common root would begin to be solved by his immediate successors, Reinhold
and Fichte. The first, formulated the so-called Principle of Consciousness
(Satz von Bewusstsein) understood as an empirical fact from which he defined,
based on conscious Representation, the relation between (phenomenal) subjective
and the (noumenal) objective representations of reality. Fichte understood such
Principle of Consciousness, not as an empirical fact, but as an act-fact (Tathandlung),
reconstructing human knowledge with his famous Three Principles. Fichte's great
discovery was to relate the Kantian a priori forms with the actions of the
subject, privileging the so-called “active side” of knowledge that Kant
introduced against the “passive side”, which he subordinated to sensations.

Such an “activist” or dynamical conception
of knowledge that is opposed to “empiricism” as well as to “innatism”, will
arrive to Piaget through a tradition of nineteenth-century French philosophy
that goes from Maine de Biran to Bergson, through Felix de Ravaisson, very
influenced by Fichte and Schelling. Such a tradition puts the essence of knowledge
in action as a reaction against Condillac's empiricist “sensism”. However,
Piaget positions himself far from the “spiritualist positivism”, moved by the
behaviorist turn of the scientific psychology in the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, against Watson's and Skinner's American Behaviorism, he inserts
between the Stimulus and the Response the Operatory Subject, understood now,
not as the Kantian Consciousness, but rather as a biological Organism,
therefore, given in a milieu in which it is capable of evolutionarily adapting,
assimilating and accommodating itself to it. In harmony with the Kantian
Primacy of Practical Reason, knowledge is seen by Piaget as an instrument more
for the evolutive adaptation, which maintains a logic in continuity with other
biological adaptive mechanisms, such as the logic of instinctive devices or
that of “neuronal circuits”.

However, maybe what has been most
characteristic of Piaget is his genetic and dialectical-positive approach in
the explanation of knowledge. Such an approach rises from the need of finding,
not so much an ultimate cause for knowledge (God, sensations, consciousness,
etc.), but rather of explaining the laws and structures of its functioning. A
way of observing scientifically and positively how such structures generate and
change is to observe how the increase of knowledge is produced in children.
This is on what Piaget focused during his long life as a researcher. His
discoveries and explanations of the Stages of Knowledge are nowadays
well-known. What we intend here is to exploit its philosophical sense. In this
case, more concretely, we will sketch a vision, which we believe to be new, of
human knowledge as a whole using the “Plotinean” conception of the
philosophical essences of Gustavo Bueno, in the same ways as we presented it in
a previous article (“Fenomenología y Operatología” also in this Blog). According to such
conception, the traditional Platonic/Aristotelic Essences, fixed and eternal,
must be considered as mobile and evolutionarily temporal, in the sense in which
Plotinus said that “One might refer to the family of the Heraclids as a unity
in the sense, not of a common element in all its members, but of a common
origin” (Enneads, VI, 1,3). This way, it is necessary to fix, following the
novel Buenist conception of essences which we presented in a precious article,
the “origin” or Nucleus from which the Essence of knowledge comes from, the
Course or development which follows and the Body which it generates.

In Piaget, as in Fichte, the Essence of
knowledge is action. But the Nucleus from which such knowledge takes off or
streams is not interior or “mental” conscious action, nor is it the sensations
coming from the external objects, but rather the unconscious actions, in the
sense of pre-linguistic, of very determinate corporal organs such as the mouth,
the feet and the hands, during the first months of a baby. This is common to
the rest of mammal animals, but unlike those closest to us, such as
chimpanzees, what distances us from them ontogenetically is of course a
superior brain, but phylogenetically it is our much more skillful hands, as
Frank R. Wilson has pointed up in the recent years in his splendid book:The Hand: How its Use Shapes the
Brain, Language, and Human Culture(Vintage,
1998). For this reason we must consider now that the nucleus or generating root
of human knowledge dwells in something so disregarded by classical theories of
knowledge as the hands. Two great figures of the twentieth century, Piaget and
Heidegger with his conception of the “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit), have
rescued from traditional oblivion the essential and primordial role of the
hands in our relation to the world. Piaget himself points out to the handling
of objects in children as the origin of the intentional knowledge that aims at
objects through mediating actions as simple as dragging a carpet when a child
wants to reach a distant object. In such a sense the locus of operatory actions
and abilities proper to human intelligence is the hands.

Such abilities, according to Piaget, go
through a Course or variational development of the manipulatory operatory
possibilities covered by the famous evolutive Three Stages: the Sensory-Motor,
that of Material Operations and that of Formal Operations. In the first the
child constructs through her actions the basic operatory categories and
structures of intelligence: that of Substance (Permanent Object), of Cause, of
Space and of Time. In the Stage of Material Operations, the child knows the
physical objects themselves by constructing with them classes, series and
means, qualitatively and quantitatively. In the third Stage, that of Formal
Operations, the child reaches knowledge of Necessity, Possibility, etc.,
through abstract combinations of symbols by means of which purely formal
relations are established, which, as in the deduction of geometrical theorems,
are achieved after a process of elimination and neutralization through
algebraic “closures” of the operations or intermediate steps. In this sense,
such course acquires a character which we can call dialectical, in so far as it
tends at its end to a negation or neutralization of that which is essential to
human knowledge, of the actions or operations in the consecution of the
ultimate equations or identities, as scientific truths that allow us to have a
firm knowledge of reality. Furthermore, such dialectic leads to the final
reduction of the rich originary actions and operations to manipulation of
symbols through writing, the “mind”, the pressing of keys on a computer or the
buttons of a console, matter of growing concern among pedagogues because of the
abandonment on the part of children of traditional games, substituted from a
corporal point of view, by the mere compulsively pushing buttons.

However the essential Course is developed,
according to G. Bueno, through a Body, a “crust” or external medium which
surrounds it and which keeps growing through cumulative layers. The crust that
surrounds the child in her learning is formed by three different educational
institutions: the household (or kindergarden), in the First Stage; the School
from six year olds up, in the Second Stage; in the Secondary Education Centre
from eleven year olds to fourteen year olds, in the Third Stage, at which
Piaget considers that, on average, the maturity of human intelligence is
reached.

Complementarily, we should consider, in
order to have not only an ontogenetic understanding of knowledge, but also
phylogenetic, the knowledge that evolutionist anthropology provides us with.
This is a task that Piaget also considered himself in his beginnings, as he
expresses in a interview ( J.C. Bringuier, Conversations with Piaget,
Chicago, 1980), but that he did not undertake because of the lack of
paleoanthropological knowledge of his time. Today, such knowledge has
abundantly increased, making such task much more feasible. In the first place,
the originary cause of the properly human has been established, his greater
capacity in intelligent behavior, in respect to other animals, in the
appearance of distinguishing features such as bipedestation, the exempt hand,
the increase of the brain's size, the articulate language, the socialization
through characteristic institutions, etc. All of this would result in the
appearance of technical inventions that, although with precedents in other
animal species, they would have acquired, starting from the so-calledhomo habilistwo million years ago, a
transcendental importance, because of their consequences, in the struggle for
evolutive life, such as is the gradual control over the natural environment
together with the increasing growth and expansion of the population around the
terrestrial globe.

This increase in human intelligence was
successfully put in relation with the appearance, not only of the exempt hand,
but also of the extremely skilled hand in comparison to the hands of apes,
which was the case of the famous australopithecus Lucy and her hand which had a
grip ability unprecedented in previous species of apes and hominids, and was
equivalent to that of a baseball pitcher. Furthermore, language would have
appeared first as a gesturally articulated language, before that it did
vocally, which gives again a central interest to the hands in so far as it is
the human organ, excluding the pharynx – whose vocal tract took longer time to
develop into a sound articulatory capability –, with more possibilities of
undertaking complicated symbolic operations, as the present language of deaf
people shows. In such a sense it has been remembered the saying credited by
Aristotle to the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, that “the man is the most
intelligent of living beings because it has hands”. Aristotle accepted the
phrase, but he interpreted it in a different sense by deriving the superiority
of the human hand from the existence of a more developed brain. Hence the
forgetfulness, in the ulterior philosophical tradition dominated by
Aristotelianism, of the essential role that Anaxagoras gave to the hands. Role
which only began to emerge again thanks to evolutionary Anthropology, which
finally attributes the growth and progressive configuration of the human brain,
that clearly takes off with the homo habilis, essentially to the exempt and
extremely skilled hand for the ulterior struggle for existence.

In such sense, we can claim, now from a
phylogenetic standpoint, that manual activity is, as in the case of
ontogenesis, the generating differentiating nucleus of human intelligence, in
this case of technic, that would essentially distance the human species from
the rest. The development of this new ability or technical capacity of the
hominids would follow a course which has being theorized in various ways in the
twentieth century, with the works of Childe, Munford, etc. and, specially,
after the interest shown by philosophy in the “essence” of technic, as in
Heidegger or Ortega y Gasset. The latter proposes to distinguish, inMeditación de la técnica (1939),
three phases in its historical development: the “technic of chance” (técnica
del azar) which corresponds to casual inventions, such as fire, made by
societies in a savage estate, underdeveloped in regard to the division of
labor; the “technic of the craftsman” (técnica del artesano), which
appears in societies with a division of labor in professions and crafts, and a large
production of instruments; the “technic of the technician” (técnica del
técnico), which would be derived from the sciences and involves machines
based on scientific theories. Accordingly, the development of technic, after
going through the phase of the “technic of chance”, and through that of the
“technic of the craftsman”, would lead, in a third phase, to the appearance of
science and the posterior “technic of the technician”.

The emergence of science occurred, as it
is generally acknowledged, with Greek Geometry, which was constituted on the
base of technical knowledge coming from surveying, measurement techniques of
fields developed especially by the Egyptians. The Greeks, from Thales of
Miletus, developed demonstration procedures though purely symbolic operations
about spatial relations that culminated in Theorems, which were expression of
truths independent of experience. Such truths were obtained through a deductive
process, algebraically “closed”, in which subjectual operations were eliminated
or neutralized, as G. Bueno claims, in order to obtain equations that expressed
universal and necessary relations between objects. Thereby the “secure path of
science”, to which Kant referred when talking about Newton, was reached for the
first time in the History of Humanity. But such course of human knowledge
(technic, crafts, science) has been covering itself, in its development, of a
crust which respectively corresponds with the institution of the
wizard-sorcerer in savage societies, the craftsman workshop in the second phase
and the School of Pythagoras or the scientific Academies in the third.

Finally, science
itself must be considered from a perspective of purely “internal” development,
that is, independently of individual and social pressures or needs; it has to
be addressed in a manner which has been, since Kant, called “transcendental”,
that is, in a way that addresses the proper “internal” conditions of
possibility for its development. In such sense, the Theories of Science
appears, after Kant, with Saint-Simon's and Comte's positivism, who propose a
reflexion about the “positive” methods of the sciences and to order and
classify them, They also propose an originary nucleus of the sciences. Comte
refers to the Cartesian metaphor of the tree of knowledge, whereby the sciences
are branches that derive from the metaphysical philosophical trunk. In turn,
Metaphysics would derive from the originary religious mentality of Humanity,
according to the law of the Three Stages. But, today we know that the sciences
do not derive from Philosophy, but rather from technics which they in turn
improve (Geometry derives form land surveying (Agrimensura), etc.). On the contrary, we could
also say that Philosophy itself emerged in Greece from the reflexion about
Geometry (Plato). Philosophy, as Positive Philosophy, doesn't appear until the
“positive” and not purely rational sciences, such as Physics, Chemistry,
Biology, are constituted in the modern world, precisely in Comte's period. In
such sense, what follows science is not properly scientific knowledge, which is
in its nature specialized, multiple and particular, but rather Positive
Philosophy, which is the proper occupation of positive philosophers, named by
Comte “specialists in generalities.”

Each science has, therefore, a particular
technique or generating nucleus of its own. But, if we consider that which
essentially characterizes scientificity, as a new form of knowledge essentially
characterized by a categorized and algebraically “closed” demonstration form
constituted by the “theorems”, according to Gustavo Bueno ( ¿Que es la ciencia?, Pentalfa, Oviedo,
1995, p. 68 s.s. There is an English translation in Gustavo Bueno, Sciences as Categorical closures,
Pentalfa Oviedo, 2013), then the generating nucleus of the gnoseological figure
of the “theorem”, is the Greek Geometry of Tales, Pythagoras, etc. The first
objective scientific truths were created in it, although purely “formal”, under
the figure of identities and equations such as Pythagoras's Theorem, “a2 +b2=
c2”, as the result of a construction, which Bueno calls alpha-operatory (alfa-operatoria),
in which an objective and valid truth for all right triangles is obtained as a
necessary result, after the elimination or neutralization of the purely
subjectual operations of the mathematician. Geometry constituted itself, then,
as a “formal” model of scientificity which marks the first development of the
course that the constitution of the sciences will follow. The second moment of
such course doesn't take place until the so-called scientific Revolution of the
Renaissance, when the physical sciences begin to be constituted. In this case,
the novelty consists in that the alpha-operatory constructions extend
themselves to physical, material entities, such as planets (Kepler's Laws), or
projectiles (parabolic trajectories of projectiles in Galileo). Such a
demonstrative model will extend itself to Chemistry in the eighteenth century.
A third phase in the course of scientificity takes place with the emergence of
the biological and human sciences, in which, nevertheless, due to the presence
in their fields of subjects whose operational trajectories are unpredictable,
they pose a serious limitation to the possibility of closed alpha-operatory
constructions, which at most can reach a form of statistical, functional
structuralist or purely conditional (Game Theory) probability, just like it
happens with social or historical laws. Such Human and Ethological Sciences, as
they are usually called, tend to move themselves principally in what G. Bueno
calls beta-operatory methodology, in which the subjectual operations are not
only not eliminated in the results, but they are demanded by this results in so
far as they are planes, projects, decisions, etc., without which the results
themselves would not be comprehensible. In such sense scientificity degenerates
here in technologies or praxeologies, as it occurs with Jurisprudence, Ethics
or economical Politics. Thereby the snake of knowledge bites its tail, in a
sort of return to its initial conditions.

This way the great circle in which
knowledge moves and evolves is transcendentally closed. A circle that puts
transcendental limits, in the Kantian sense, to so many futurist dreams of
which scientist themselves are often the victims because they don't have a well
founded Idea of scientificity, even though they put it into practice in an
admirable way. A circle that we, nevertheless, cannot consider as “vicious”,
but rather as completely virtuous, for it is thanks to it that our knowledge
has advanced and advances more each time, even within the basic
anthropological-transcendental limits, those principally marked by our humble
upper extremities, the hands, that far from disappearing, appear as necessary
and indispensable in order to understand those sciences which appeared the
last, but which Comte himself considered to be the first because of the higher
dignity of their objects, human beings themselves.